Whats the safe speed of getting new incoming links to site

How fast is to fast?

[stinky]

i have been out of the whole link building for about 2 years and am starting to do it again. I have heard people say link building is all about natural look and feel now a days.
Over the past 2 months i have gotten about 500 new one way links (using my personal strategy which worked great 3 years ago) from general web sites related to general topics to my site. But my old site has seemed to be moving down in the serps instead of up and i am wondering if its because of the pace that i have been getting links to the site.
This leads to my question, at what pace should you get incoming links (1 ways & recips) to your site.
Another point i want to make, even though i got 500 new one way links to my site over the course of 2 month, i am sure the search engines would take anywhere from 1 week to several months to find them all, so isnt that like getting links to your site at a slow pace?

[rankfirst]

Getting links to the site, there are 2 aspects to it.
First one is what kind of sites in terms of PR are linking back to you? and Secondly, are they complimenting to your website subject?

To elaborate on both the aspects, in general always build links from sites with PR > 3 or 5 provided your site is having less PR, it will benefit your PR, also look for the page from where the actual link is coming to your website, whether the source page has some PR, is it been Indexed by search engines, if not, then it is useless to have external link(without PR) coming to your website.

Second aspect of compliment is based on subject of your website, for e.g. if you are site is about custom made playing cards, then getting links from a Jewelery/cosmetic site would not make sense, rather it should come from a Casino, Printing, paper manufacturers site, etc.

I hope the e.g. above answers your query well.

[stinky]

...This leads to my question, at what pace should you get incoming links (1 ways & recips) to your site?